Questioning everything

The Harm of Animal Testing

Have you ever wondered how the makers of your lipstick makes it feel so soft? Animal testing is the practice of testing cosmetics, soap, lotion, medicine, with potentially harmful chemicals on dogs, cats, ferrets, rabbits, pigs, sheep, monkeys, chimpanzees and others. Disregarding the cruelty of the testing, animals testing can be inaccurate.

The European Union , Israel, and India have banned the sale of any cosmetics or cosmetics ingredients that have been tested on animals. These marketing bans mean that companies all around the world will have to abandon animal testing for cosmetics they want to sell. It is a huge step forward but no there is American law that bans the use of animal testing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration advises cosmetics manufacturers “to employ whatever testing is appropriate and effective for substantiating the safety of their products” and in China, some products require specific animal tests.

Besides cosmetics, animals also test medicine. Many of the tests involving animals have been declared inaccurate, such as Vioxx, a drug used to treat arthritis, was found to be safe when tested in monkeys (and five other animal species) but has been estimated to have caused around 320,000 heart attacks and strokes and 140,000 deaths worldwide.
Human volunteers testing a new monoclonal antibody treatment i the UK in 2006 suffered a severe allergic reaction and nearly died. The same drug had been used on monkeys at 500 times the dose given to the volunteers and failed to predict the severe side effects.

There are many companies that do allow animal testing. The list below is all the companies that do test on animals.

Any familiar brands? A list of companies that don’t test on animals can be found here (pdf file).

American law allows animals to be burned, shocked, poisoned, isolated, starved, drowned, addicted to drugs, and brain-damaged or in simple language: tortured. No American law forbids any animal experimentation, however trivial or painful. Shop cruelty-free by purchasing products from companies who don’t test on animals anywhere in the world.